Professor Quassim Cassam

Simple Seeing

I'll be discussing the relevance of the phenomenon of inattentional blindness for Dretske's account of simple seeing. In his 2007 paper 'What Change Blindness Teaches' Dretske proposes a knowledge test for what a subject is conscious of, according to which you must be aware of x if you can see (and thereby know) that x is F. I will examine this test in the light of Chabris and Simons' 'invisible gorilla' experiment and suggest that reflection on this experiment calls into question some aspects of Dretske's discussion.